Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in sworn in before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA, 27 September 2018. (Michael Reynolds/Pool Photo via AP)Michael Reynolds

Kimberly Corban got halfway through a live stream of the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testimony hearing before turning it off.

An outspoken advocate of sexual assault victims, a motivational speaker and a survivor of a 2006 sexual assault in Greeley, Corban said major news events don’t usually affect her.

“And this one did,” she said. “That’s when I knew something was different about it.”

She wasn’t prepared for the viciousness that surrounded the hearings, she said, and she’s not talking about what viewers saw on C-SPAN when the testimony leading up to Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice unfolded. During the testimony, Ford recounted when, she said, Kavanaugh assaulted her as a teenager. Kavanaugh denied it. On Sept. 27, the world watched as both of them testified.

“I’m talking about how it was picked apart and talked about and discussed and thrown around as a political football afterward,” Corban said. “In and of itself, having to hear someone’s story of trauma can be really hard, and you have to make sure you practice your own type of self care, but then just relentlessness everywhere else. I just wasn’t ready.”

She wasn’t the only one in Weld County to feel that way. Greeley’s Sexual Assault Victim Advocate Center saw a 56 percent increase in calls in September compared to the year before. The center, which offers a 24-hour hotline and counseling services for walk-in clients regardless of income, assisted 134 people this September and 86 at the same time last year.

Resources when you're ready

SAVA 24-hour Rape Crisis Hotline: (970) 472-4200

More information about SAVA’s counseling, support groups and individual advocacy, including help to work through their rights and options, services can be found at savacenter.org.

To contact the Greeley office, call (970) 506-4059. The Fort Collins office can be reached at (970) 472-4204.

On a national level, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network saw a 147 percent increase in calls during the hearings.

“There have been more people calling that have been triggered by media,” said Dorothy Farrel, the executive director of SAVA. “A lot of our clients are feeling upset and being traumatized by the media, just the thought that they’re being questioned.”

It’s a common phenomenon, Farrel said. A big news story about sexual assault breaks, the news cycle starts, and it impacts assault victims. The result isn’t always negative.

“It allows them to feel safe and validated that they’re not the only ones it happened to,” Farrel said. “And so, I think media triggers people, sometimes in a good way, because it allows them to say, ‘It did happen to me 30 years ago, and it’s OK for me to talk about now.’”

In her experience with SAVA, Farrel said it’s common for the organization to come across people who seek help with assaults that happened decades earlier. Often, she said, people don’t acknowledge the assault and only seek help years after it happened.

“Back then, the culture wasn’t as open,” she said. “It was a very secretive thing, and we’re finding that the older population is coming forward and talking about it.”

But there also are times when news events have a negative impact on victims.

“People, for example, are questioning them or mocking them or bullying survivors publicly,” Farrel said. “That, I believe, will trigger people into validating their fears of sharing that it happened to them. It also makes people feel that it’s not important to society, that it’s something that’s not a valid issue, that it’s swept aside, that people really don’t care about people being assaulted.”

Often, the statistics reflect those fears. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, just 23 percent of victims report assaults to law enforcement.

Corban’s story was different. She decided to share her name with news outlets after the man who assaulted her was convicted.

“It was heavily followed, a stranger, coed, all the things people want to read about,” she said. “I made the decision to release my name when we got the guilty verdict.”

Corban said she knows her case isn’t typical, and not just because she decided to go public with it.

“My case is atypical in that it was a stranger, and I reported right away,” she said. “He was not only caught, but also successfully prosecuted and is spending time in prison. Statistically speaking, that is a very, very small amount.”

She said she didn’t have to battle with the guilt, shame or breach of trust that many victims experience.

Still, she said she felt alone.

“Twelve years ago, I felt very alone because I didn’t know anybody else really firsthand who had been through something like this,” Corban said. “And then it starts coming out that plenty of people had.”

Now, with other topics that get a lot of media coverage, such as the #MeToo movement, Corban, who has traveled the country to give speeches about assault, said she knows how common assaults are.

“I’ve never been able to give a speech where someone didn’t come up to me afterward and disclose,” she said.

After the Kavanaugh hearings, Corban was the guest speaker at the SAVA Soiree, an annual fundraising event hosted by the organization.

“After feeling so defeated and helpless and just emotionally exhausted, I have never felt so empowered by being in a room with more than 800 people that are there devoted to helping victims and survivors,” Corban said. “It didn’t matter what was playing out on a national scale.”

— Sara Knuth covers government for The Tribune. You can reach her at (970) 392-4412, sknuth@greeleytribune.com or on Twitter @SaraKnuth.